Get one of everything. Or at least one of everything that tempts you in that moment because the next time you return to Shokuh Patisserie at Westcliff Plaza in Newport Beach, those items you skipped might not be there again. Everything in the display case changes regularly. And those missed connections will haunt you. 

The yellow thing that looks like a stick of butter, for example, isn’t always available and it is absolutely incredible. It is a vanilla cake layered with lemon jelly and meringue, coated with a gooey, sweet-sour yuzu mousse and positioned atop a French butter cookie, or sablé. It’s a lemon merengue pie in a fancy dress. It might be the best pastry you eat this year. Unless you missed it. 

If you see something shaped like a donut but with a surface of bright green velvet, get that one, too, while you can. That’s a different type of vanilla cake, sturdier, filled with strawberry jelly, the whole of which is somehow airbrushed with pistachio mousse to make it look like draped velvet. It is insanely good. You will never look at a cake donut the same way again. 

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The beautiful heart-shaped cakes glazed in bright-red strawberry jelly are usually available, but their innards have been known to change. Sometimes you cut into it to find chocolate. Other times, strawberry. In this case, you might never know what you missed.

There are some items more straightforward, like individual chocolate layer cakes and mocha layer cakes that are so fluffy, it’s easy to justify eating more than one. 

You’ll need to handle the passion-fruit mousse cake with caution. Its exterior is extra-sticky, like fly paper, but exponentially more delicious. And once you get it on your fingers, I believe the only way to get it off is to thrust each finger, one by one, into your mouth and suck it clean.

Cakes, mousse, tarts, croissants… I’ve enjoyed everything I’ve tasted from Shokuh. Baking like this requires skill, which only comes from lots of training. And while there might be other bakeries in Orange County that sell more intriguing viennoiserie (croissants, danishes, etc.), I’m pretty confident there is no one else creating patisserie (artistic cakes) as beautiful and as delicious as what’s available daily in the pastry cases here. 

Shokuh Patisserie 

Where: 1735 WestCliff Drive, Newport Beach

When: Breakfast/lunch daily 

Phone: 949-287-6017

Online: instagram.com/shokuh_patisserie_official

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